


Night, Death

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28627377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Sollux Captor is dead. Trapped in purgatory, he wanders aimlessly until he hears a mysterious voice.
Relationships: Sollux Captor/Aradia Megido
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	Night, Death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aniyha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aniyha/gifts).



It was oblivion he had expected.

Oblivion, the endless night, the final absence of any sliver of anything that might be considered thought or consciousness or life. He imagined it would be like falling asleep, the stretch of time when one is simply unaware of anything before they wake up again come morning...except, of course, without the waking up part. 

What Sollux Captor had not expected was to simply...continue. If anything, it was more like the waking up part than the being asleep part; he just became aware again, and if there had not been the memories of those last couple minutes still bouncing around in his head, he might have just assumed he’d actually fallen asleep and had some really shit dream. After all, it wasn’t like shit dreams were outside of the norm.

On instinct, he reached up to adjust his glasses, only he did not reach up because he had no arms with which to do so, nor did he have glasses or eyes to look through them with or a face around those eyes or anything at all except Sollux Captor. He concluded straight away that it was fucking weird and that he was extremely uncomfortable with it. It felt like he should have a body, should be able to reach out and touch something, but he just...couldn’t, and once he had noticed that and gotten to thinking about it, he realized that there was a complete lack of anything except for...him. He was just Sollux, and that was it. 

Panic threatened to set in immediately. He had heard that people could lose their minds in sensory deprivation tanks, and he now understood. It was an awful sensation, akin to being helpless and restrained, but the opposite. He ached to wiggle his toes, stretch out, something, anything at all, but just couldn’t, and on account of the absolutely, mind-blowingly stupid final minutes of his life, there was no escaping it. He wanted to scream, but had no mouth with which to do it.

He forced himself to take a breath (not literally) and take stock, because otherwise he felt he might finally fully lose it. His environment warranted investigation. Just where the hell was he? The room he occupied was empty, lit by what he felt should have been a yellowish luminescent bulb, but everything was actually bathed in a deep shade of blue; not one emanating from the bulb itself, but just something that was, as if someone had found a way to dye the air itself. A window lay on one wall, exactly in the center, off-putting in some subtle way; on the other was a door, dark in color and with what looked like a wrought iron knob on one side of it. The floor beneath his feet -- er, beneath him was a nice-looking hardwood. He tried to walk forward to the window and failed, on the account of having no legs with which to lift. He tried to sort of will himself forward, and felt a bizarre vertigo as he seemed to kind of appear at the window. Movement had been figured out; that was a good start. He peered through the window, and saw what looked like an ordinary suburban street outside; he could tell it was nighttime due to the blue-tinged moon, and could just barely make out what seemed to be other people in lit windows on the other side of the street. Okay, so that didn’t give him a ton to go off of. He moved to the door, and sure enough, willing it to open caused it to pop open for him. He stepped through and appeared in what might have been some kind of bar or tavern. The room was empty, though it bore signs of occupation -- beer glasses on the tables, some full, others half-drunk. Music seemed to play faintly from somewhere, and he thought he could almost feel the laughter as well as hear it. Again, though, all was tinged in blue, from the turned-off TVs up above to the pool of what certainly appeared to be vomit on the floor, immediately adjacent to a tipped-over barstool. A door, identical to the one from before, sat on an opposite wall, seeming to cut a poster for a band he’d never heard of in half. Again, he stepped through.

It didn’t take him long to learn, or at least guess, what was happening. These all seemed to be places, real places, that he had left behind. It seemed like this dimension, or glitch, or whatever it was was shaped by perception, and to some degree by thought and emotion. The latter two he sometimes got sorts of “echoes” of; he was pretty sure that more intense thoughts and emotions produced more clear sensations for him. He wondered if the people occupying these spaces could feel his presence in any meaningful way, though he had zero ways of testing such a thing. 

He had little idea of how long he wandered between those places, those backwaters of perception. He could see day and night sometimes through windows and the like, but they seemed random, and he wondered if time had any kind of actual bearing on him, or if he was simply outside of that now. Really, he despised the wandering, but what choice did he have? He had the nagging feeling that he would probably go fucking nuts if he just sat and stayed put for a while. Hell, maybe he was already mad. He wasn’t all that far from that point in the first place, as much as an emotional fuckup as he was, and clearly something was wrong with him to be such a fucking idiot. The way he had died was just perfectly fitting, wasn’t it? It was a dumb fuckup for a dumb fuckup and all he could think about was what a goddamn idiot he was and how much he deserved this because wait was that someone talking?

It wasn’t like before, where he just got impressions of people talking, but couldn’t make anything out. No, that was a clear voice! It was distorted and seemed duplicated in some way, but fuck, it was an actual voice! It rang out again, and for once, he felt actually elated to be hearing another voice. It sounded like a woman, young-ish, her voice soft and hollow. 

“Hello? Is there anyone with me here tonight?”

Sollux tried to shout that yes, yes, he was here, but then remembered his distinct lack of talking apparatus. Talking had been easy before; just vibrate the cords and shape the mouth in a practiced, learned way, but in the absence of both of those it was a distinctly more complicated matter, and he was only now giving himself a crash course in doing it; he had figured he’d never need to communicate again.

“Please, if any spirits can hear my voice, please give me a sign.”

He felt like he could explode with the desperation when he finally figured out the whole speech thing; it was like moving, but different in a way that escaped words for him. It was like willing thought itself to be moved.

“Yes!” He shouted back, his voice bouncing off the walls of the hotel room he currently occupied, the sound itself seeming to refract and crystallize and shatter and re-form again. There was no response for a moment, and Sollux wanted to cry at the thought of having lost it. But then, it rang through.

“...that was strong,” she said, whoever she was, sounding like she was just making a remark to herself. “Who am I speaking with?”

“Sollux! Sollux Captor,” he cried back, his voice dripping with relief. “How are you doing this? Are you in here with me?”

He heard her laugh quietly. “Well, normally I ask that question,” she said, as nonchalantly as if she was talking with some old friend. “I don’t know. Can you...see me?”

He definitely could not see her. “No, I can’t,” he said, somewhat disappointed. “Are you in this hotel room with me?”

A beat; subtle, but there. “I am not in a hotel room, no,” she said. “I’m in my own room, actually.”

A flash of hope shot through him. “Okay, give me a second here,” he said. He moved to the door, currently superimposed over what must have been the hotel room’s bathroom door. A discarded bra lay before it. He stared at the door, and with all his mental might, he willed to move there, to wherever the unknown girl was. Nothing happened, no sudden flash of light or any other kind of confirmation. Mentally tensing with anxiety, he willed the door open and stepped through, decompressing with relief as he saw that it had worked.

It was the first time he had actually seen another person, alive or otherwise, in the bizarre afterlife he had been wandering, and for that matter, the first time that time seemed to be flowing as it should, judging by the small, flickering flames topping the candles that adorned the girl’s desk. The girl herself sat in a slightly ratty office chair behind said desk. It was hard to tell specific details about her due to the blue tint that had not ceased to coat his view, but he could see enough; she was young, probably around the age he had been when he’d made his little mistake. Her skin looked to be pale, though the blueness of it made making out specific tinting somewhat difficult. Her hair cascaded to her shoulders and down her back in a wave, just messy enough to be noticeably so but not so much that it might give unseemly impressions about her. She peered over what looked to be a Ouija board on the desk, directly before some kind of sheep or ram skull, itself topped with a candle. The room was cluttered, the shelves adorned with more books than he could count as well as artifacts and knick-knacks in a similar vein of interest as the skull. Was that mystic shit how she was able to do this? 

As if she sensed him somehow, she spoke, and her face showed equal measures of concern and glee (two emotions Sollux found strange to be so plainly mixed) as her lips moved, also seeming to be in regular real time. “Are you still there?” She asked, staring down at the board as if her life depended on it. The planchette sat still in the center, unmoved. 

“No, I’m here now,” he said. “I guess that means you still can’t see me then.”

The girl grinned. “No, I can’t, but that’s great.” She paused, looking a little sheepish, working her jaw back and forth. “Can you...move the planchette on the board?”

Sollux snorted, or at least made the mental approximation of such a sound. “No, I’m not going to do the dumb Ouija shit, come on. I can see you and all your spooky stuff here, what else do you need?”

The girl grinned. Sollux could not for the life (or...death?) of him tell if it was genuine, or some kind of mask she was putting on. “Okay, you don’t have to use the Ouija. This is the strongest connection I’ve ever gotten!” The excitement, if nothing else, sounded legitimate. “My name is Aradia. Thank you for communicating with me, Sollux.”

Part of him wanted to thank her, to explain the purgatory he had until just now been wandering, but he held himself back. The last thing he wanted to do was open up those floodgates, because she would pretty quickly be begging him to shut the fuck up. “So what is it you’re doing here exactly?” He asked instead. “You’ve got this crazy setup going, what’s your deal?”

Her smile, somehow, only seemed to grow wider. “I’m communing with spirits,” she said, as naturally as if he had just asked her what day it was. “It’s something I’ve always been interested in. Like I said, though, I’ve never quite gotten a response like this! Or any response, really.” 

So that just confirmed that the girl, Aradia, was into the spookier side of things. Sollux had never had even the slightest hint of interest in anything like that; it had all been bullshit until he’d died and then it wasn’t. “So what do you want out of me?” He asked. “I’m not an oracle ghost and unless you’ve got some programming assignment due there’s not a lot I have to offer. Really, you’ve got some pretty garbage luck if I’m the best you’ve gotten.”

To his surprise, she threw back her head and laughed, a light, fluttery sound that somehow made him self-conscious of his short, ugly little snort of a laugh. “No, stupid, I’m not looking for answers. I was looking for you! Or more precisely, dead people like you. It’s just fun.”

“Don’t call me stupid. That’s just disrespect for the dead. That’s how you get your shit haunted, stupid.” With the absence of anything like facial features or body language, he had to inject just slightly more of a joking tone into his words than usual, and even then they came across pretty deadpan.

If the words affected Aradia, though, she didn’t show it. If anything, she seemed to have almost the exact opposite reaction than what Sollux might have expected. “Oh, haunt my shit all you want,” she said, in a voice that was less of a challenge and more of a polite request. “I have an awful lot I would like to ask of you, Sollux, if you would allow me to. If not, well...,” she paused for a moment, her smile growing almost sad. “Well, that’s okay. You can be on your way.”

“Being asked a bunch of questions or wandering forever in an endless labyrinth of emotions and thoughts. Yeah, big fucking contest right there.”

Aradia’s grin settled right back into its original state, and Sollux got the impression that this was just her natural state. It suited her much better than his old grimace had suited him, he thought. He swore he could detect a flush on her cheeks as well, but chalked that up to the strange tint of everything.

“Okay! So, first things first, please explain that labyrinth comment of yours.”  
\----  
Much of the night, or day, or whatever it was after that was spent shooting questions back and forth. Really, back and forth was a bit of a misnomer; Aradia asked Sollux 90% of the questions, with only a select few things that Sollux asked of her, mostly questions that served to orient him a bit. From her, he learned that it had been about two months since his death. By some coincidence, Aradia didn’t live all that far from him, only a little over an hour’s drive away. Still, she had never heard of him or his death. Sollux couldn’t tell if it was comforting that he hadn’t fucked up too many days or if it was depressing that, apparently, nobody had given enough of a shit to have his demise be widely reported. He supposed that fit; everyone, with good reason, had thought of him as a fucking idiot. 

From Sollux, Aradia learned much, much more. She asked him about every question he could imagine asking a ghost, and then some. What was it like being dead? Was there an actual afterlife, or was it some other state of being? Could he see, hear, smell, feel? Did he ever see other ghosts? What had it felt like, having her commune with him? Sollux answered the questions patiently, dutifully, honestly; a part of his personality recoiled at the thought of being sat down and interrogated, but he told that part to shut the fuck up because at least he was doing something other than wandering through that nightmare maze. 

Of that particular part, Aradia showed even more extreme interest, and by the time she had finished asking about it he thought she must understand the “afterlife” about as well as he did (not that he understood it all that well, even after wandering through it for, apparently, two months). She talked endlessly about the transmission of feelings and thoughts between the living and the dead, and how usually it went the other way around which was why people always talked about feeling sad in haunted houses, and the theories she had about what time actually meant, if anything, beyond the wall of death, and about a hundred other things Sollux barely understood. He would have liked to think it all sounded like bullshit, but he was a fucking ghost. “Bullshit” wasn’t a thing he could use to explain things away anymore, because when he was alive, ghosts themselves were bullshit. 

The hours ticked on by. 

Aradia yawned, leaning back in her chair. “I have to admit that I think I’m running out of things to ask about here,” she said, seeming almost embarrassed to admit it. 

“Are you going to want me to fuck off once you’ve got all your answers?” He asked, trying to sound like he was joking but probably coming off just a bit too breezy. “I get it, interrogate the dead idiot and start selling your comprehensive guide to ghosts. I bet you’ll make millions, people will eat that shit right up I bet.”

Aradia shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know what good a ghost around here would do me, really.”

A flare of panic morphed quickly into something between anguish and anger. “Well fuck me then. I guess I’ll go back to wandering endlessly, that’s fine I guess. Wish I had known I was going to be a nuisance so I wouldn’t have sat through that interrogation there --”

She cut him off with a giggle. “I’m joking, dummy! Of course you can stay around. I already told you I thought this was amazing.” She closed the little leather book she had been taking notes in. “And for the record, I’m not writing a book about this. Well, at least not one that would be published.”

Sollux felt like he was about an inch tall. “Oh. Right.” He said stupidly. He knew that if he had a stomach, it would be turning itself in knots. “Yeah. I’ll stay if you want, I guess.” He paused a moment, just watching her as her laugh dissolved back into a grin, but one that was...smaller, somehow. He’d probably pissed her off. Fucking IDIOT. “I didn’t think the interrogation was bad,” he said lamely. “I liked answering everything.”

She laughed again. “I know, Sollux.”

There was a moment of quiet. Neither of them spoke. Aradia barely moved but for the drumming of black nails on her desk.

“One more thing,” she said suddenly, sitting back up straight. Her elbows she sat on the desk, her palms supporting her chin. “Just for me, if you’ll answer it.”

“Sure, anything,” he said. It would be like him to fuck up the first interaction he’d had since dying.

“What do you miss about being alive? Anyone special? Tell me about you.”

He stayed silent for a moment. The prompt was simple, but he felt like his thoughts had had a lead weight attached to them.

“Are you still th--”

“Yeah, I’m here,” he interrupted. For the first time he was glad he didn’t have a mouth, because he knew it would be bone-dry if he did. “Uh. Not really anyone or anything special. I lived alone. Family fucked off years ago.” Another pause. “I guess I miss...fuck, I don’t know,” he said, and it all came spilling forward then, all the feelings he hadn’t had time or the desire to think about while he wandered. “I miss being able to feel things. Not, like, emotionally, but actually feel things. I see you there and I wish I could feel my ass in the chair and the clothes on my skin, all those things your brain tunes out after a while. I told you I’m just, like, a floating personality here, right? It’s actually very fucking frustrating, like when someone is sitting on your chest and you can’t breathe. Shit, I want to breathe too! And eat, and all of that,” and when he stopped, he didn’t stop for breath, because he didn’t need to breathe. Aradia had gone on forever about her passions; Sollux could literally go on forever, if he wanted. “I want to be alive. I made a dumb fucking mistake, and now I’m stuck like this forever. You probably actually should kick me out before I go crazy and become a demon or whatever.”

Aradia was quiet for a few seconds. She stared, blinked a few times. The grin had fallen away from her face; it seemed unnatural for her to be taken off guard, somehow, like she might have been prepped for anything. But after a moment, the soft, personal little smile returned, just a soft upturn of one side of her mouth, and she sat fully up as she spoke again. “That’s not how demons work,” she said with such confidence that Sollux would have bet his life, his original, actual life on that being the utmost truth. “Maybe you can feel all that again.”

Sollux mentally snorted. The sound was utterly humorless. “How? If you haven’t noticed, I have this little problem --”

“Possess me.”

Sollux stopped dead in his tracks.

“Don’t look at me like that! Or feel at me like that, I guess,” she said, laughing softly again. “I’m serious. Possess me, walk around a bit, feel things again. Hopefully you don’t permanently condemn my soul to that maze, because it does sound kind of awful, really.” 

Sollux took a moment before he started speaking, his words coming out slowly, carefully. “I’m not sure about this. I’m not all that good at being a ghost, if you haven’t noticed. What if I actually fuck something up?”

Aradia actually just shrugged. “I’ll forgive you.”

Sollux hesitated again. “...are you sure? Really, I wouldn’t want someone walking around with my body. You don’t want to do this, we don’t, it’s really --”

Aradia rolled her eyes, her grin spreading wide once more. “Stop stalling and possess me! It’s fine, I promise.”

“I...okay, here goes, I guess.” Sollux had zero idea of how to possess someone. Mentally willing himself into her body didn’t seem to have much of an effect. He turned, looked around, maybe there was a -- and there it was.  
The door wasn’t like the rest of the ones he had seen. In fact, it sat right next to the usual door, the one that would extricate him from Aradia’s room. This new door was of a lighter-colored wood, and seemed to have a bright light just beyond it. The doorknob was of a deep gold, so deep that he could tell it as gold even through the strange tint of everything. It seemed like he could smell something emanating from it; an earthy, natural smell, like the deep forest with logs rotting on the ground and thick moss on everything. Sollux had hated woods like that, had hated woods in general, but now the smell was as inviting as anything he could imagine.

Behind him: “Well?”

Sollux’s voice was calm, even. “Making sure you were still on board. Close your eyes, get ready.”

He couldn’t see it, but he knew she had done so.

He willed the door to open, and then moved through it.

He opened his eyes, his real, flesh and blood eyes on a room colored only as one would expect. The room was lit only by the candles sitting before him on the desk, the bone-white of the skull staring emptily back at him. The wood of the bedposts was dark, almost black, and worn in a way that only made them prettier. The blankets on top of the bed were neatly made, in complete contrast to the organized chaos lining the shelves, the leaning books and personal effects. He took a breath, a deep breath, straining it in so hard he felt his ribs might tear through the buttons of his shirt. The feeling of fabric against his skin, previously ignored through familiarity, now felt absolutely sublime, as did the feeling of the hair cascading over his ears and down his back.  
Everything was just a little off, a little different than he remembered being alive feeling. But it was life, truly, and it was grand. 

A tiny itch sat in the back of his head, a little nagging thing, like when he would forget something and know he had forgotten it but not be sure of what exactly it was. He wondered what that was, until the itch spoke.  
“So?” Aradia said, her voice sounding as if she was right behind him. Sollux fought the urge to actually turn and look. He knew there was only wall behind him.

“I...thank you,” he said. The feeling of talking in someone else’s voice somehow managed to catch him off guard; almost as strange was hearing Aradia talk like him. The voice in his head was still breathy and even, like he knew she sounded, but the voice coming from Aradia’s actual mouth was harsh, the words delivered with an even punch, and only the lack of a lisp caused by fucked up teeth discerned it from Sollux’s voice...but spoken with Aradia’s voice. It was honestly off-putting.  
The voice in his head giggled. “I must admit, I was just a little worried you were actually something malevolent trying to steal my body.”

Sollux frowned. “If you were worried at all you shouldn’t have fucking done it.”

“Life’s nothing without some risks, Sollux.”

Sollux grimaced. “Yeah. About that.”

There was a moment of quiet. Sollux couldn’t stop himself from running his hands over her desk, tapping his feet on her floor, running his fingers through her hair, just sensing everything. 

Aradia spoke up after nearly a minute. Her voice seemed quieter, somehow, sadder. It was hard to tell; Sollux didn’t understand how she had put up with talking to him so long with a complete lack of facial cues. “I can...feel something,” she said. “Something from...from you, I think.”

Sollux furrowed his eyebrows. “Yeah? Like what kind of something?”

Aradia spluttered for a moment before finding her words. “Well, let me specify. I can see what you’re seeing, kiiiind of feel what you’re feeling with my body. If this is how the possessed feel when their bodies are being used for evil…” She trailed off for a second, then snapped back to what she was saying. “But I can feel things that I think are you, too. Like...echoes of your feelings. And…” She trailed off again, her voice low and dripping with melancholy.   
“And what?”

“You’re just...were you this miserable, Sollux?”

He thought back on the existence that had been his own. He wondered if she could sense his thoughts, too, and felt self-conscious for a second, then remembered what she was allowing him to do just now and forced the feeling down. He remembered the long nights, the friends forced to deal with him, the sheer inner pain, the final night of total agony, the bipolarism swinging wildly back and forth, unmitigated by anything, owing to his stupid fucking pride and misplaced dignity.  
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I was.”

Aradia went quiet. “I’m sorry, Sollux,” she mind-whispered. “I...I don’t know, I didn’t think to ask about --”

“Stop it,” he snapped, the sound completely alien when spoken with her voice. “Don’t get dragged down by what a self-centered fucking idiot I was. Shit sucked, but it sucked for me.”

“Okay,” she said after a moment, still not sounding wholly convinced. She quickly changed the subject. “Go ahead, get up, walk around a bit! Enjoy yourself.”

Standing up proved to actually kind of be difficult. Walking was even worse. As much trouble as he’d had figuring out locomotion whilst a spirit, re-learning how exactly to manipulate meat was not a simple task. It was like playing QWOP in the flesh at first, but just as before, he managed to get the hang of it with a few laps around Aradia’s room. He walked to the door -- the real door -- and reached out, putting his hand on the knob. He hesitated.

“No, Sollux, there’s nothing out there I don’t want you to see,” she said with a giggle. “You’ve got the run of the place. Smash something if it would make you feel better, after -- after all of that.”

Sollux opened the door. “Smashing shit sounds like a fucking dumb idea.”

Aradia’s flat was small, simple, and cozy. Outside of her room a short hallway led past a bathroom, then out into a relatively large living room with a conjoined kitchenette. There weren’t a ton of decorations up; a few pretty paintings of various landscapes, one large tapestry of a skeletal, sombrero-wearing woman that Aradia excitedly informed him was Santa Muerte, and a couple of magnetic to-do lists on the fridge. She didn’t have a TV (“Nothing on there I want to see,” she said, the slight disgust audible in her voice, “especially those abysmal ghost shows.”) The blinds were drawn over her windows, but peering through them, Sollux saw it was completely dark outside, save for the streetlamps lining her street. The clock told him it was nearly three in the morning.

“Why were you summoning ghosts at two in the fucking morning?” Sollux asked.

“I wasn’t summoning, I was communing,” She corrected. “What did you do at two in the morning?”

Sollux didn’t have a good answer for that.

“Oh! Let me show you something,” Aradia said, abandoning the previous question as if it had never been asked. “Look on the little shelf under the coffee table.”

Sollux did so, sitting on the threadbare loveseat beside the table. “There’s a little book here.”

Aradia feigned an annoyed sigh. “I can see that, and I’m the one who put it there. Pull it out and open it.”

Sollux dutifully did so, opening it to its first page. A photograph of Aradia beamed back at him, apparently near the edge of some hole. Reddish dirt coated her skin in a visible film, and her visible knees were scraped and filthy.

“A scrapbook,” he said aloud, simply to feel the pleasant sensation of his vocal cords vibrating in his throat. 

“Yeah! That was me at an excavation of a Cherokee burial ground,” she said dreamily. “I love archaeology, Sollux, you have no idea. I’d take you on a dig, if you couldn’t be the dig.”

“I think I would kind of hate that,” he said, not able to keep the grin off his face.

“I didn’t ask! I would take you, and you could be a grouch all you wanted.”

That sounded nice to Sollux, actually, but he didn’t say so. He just turned the page.

“Oh! That one there is me in Cancun.” A page turned. “And that’s Giza! The pyramids are amazing, Sollux, you have no idea!” A page turned. “And there’s me with my mom, when I was very young. She passed away not long after that.” A page turned. “Sollux, what did you look like?”

The subject changed so suddenly that he had already half-turned to the next page before he fully processed what she had actually said. He stammered for a moment; again, stammering did not suit the voice, somehow. “I was skinny,” he said when he finally wrestled his tongue down under control. “Tall --” he stretched his legs out as far as they would go, estimated their length “-- but not that much taller than you.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t look all that great, really.” His cheeks burned; he was embarrassed, though he couldn’t quite say why. He ran a sharp, straight hand through the thick black hair atop his head; an old nervous habit, reborn. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just keep feeling these things you felt, and getting little memories I think, but I still don’t have any idea.” A pause. “Did you have, like, a Facebook or something?”

Sollux had been far too private a person for things like that. He seriously doubted there was a single photograph of him online anywhere, unless he’d gotten caught in the background of a news photo or something. “No.” He said simply. A thought occurred to him. It was rash, but things moved pretty slowly back at the apartment, so maybe…

“What are you doing?” Aradia asked at the back of his head as he stood up and began looking around, poring over the kitchen counter, patting his -- her -- pockets down. 

“Where are your car keys? We’re taking a field trip.”

He could almost feel her grin again. “Little hook on the doorframe in my room,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”  
\-----  
The drive was a little over an hour, but shot by in what felt like a couple minutes.

Few other cars occupied the highway in the grim hours between three and four in the morning. For the most part, it was only the lights of Aradia’s older, dark red car (which she was very certain he knew of her love for) that lit the dark asphalt, coupled with the tall, orange-yellow glow of the streetlights above. Early in the ride, she tried interrogating him again, attempting to force their destination out of him, but eventually she must have realized that she wasn’t getting anything out of him, because she satisfied herself on just asking about him.

He answered all her questions honestly, if not with a little bit of griping (“I’m taking you somewhere cool, is that not enough?”). He told her of his programming projects, of his freelance work, of his long-gone parents and the troubled relationship he’d had with them before deciding he was done with all their shit. She laughed when he told her about his idiot friends, and was quiet for almost ten minutes when she finally pried the way he’d died out of him, and when she quietly apologized he told her too harshly it was fine, and then she continued on and before long it was like nothing had ever happened, and he had thought she sounded almost proud when he’d told her about his childhood fascination with psychics.

Finally, though, he parked outside the apartment complex. It was clearly a cheap-but-decent affair; the central office sat squat at the front of the parking lot, with each building beyond that holding eight apartments. He exited the car.

“Where are we, Sollux?” She asked.

“Home.”

The cold dew wet her tall socks, her flat shoes, the bottom of her flowing dress, but he didn’t mind and she assured him that she didn’t mind, either. The sky was clear above them, but the moon was new, and the night around them would have been pitch dark if not for the modern conveniences of electric lights. Most of the windows were dark, though some still showed pale television screens or rambunctious kids enjoying their weekend, fuelled by soda and cold pizza and video games. 

He stopped outside building B, dug around in a small bush in the pathetic little garden out front, retrieving a tarnished key. 

“Why is there a key in that bush?”

Sollux grinned. “I hid it there.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never liked welcome mats.”

Aradia just laughed.

The key fit into the lock smoothly, and with a metallic turn, the creak of an old doorknob, and a gentle push (the doorframe was fucked up), apartment 2B was open.

Just like he’d suspected, everything was just as he had left it, save for the thin layer of dust and small smatterings of mouse droppings here and there. The complex had never been especially expedient on taking care of business, and luckily that had not changed much in the couple months he’d been dead. 

The living room and kitchen were one moldy, collapsing apple short of looking completely unused. The only decoration on the wall was a framed poster for System Shock, the plastic now coated in dust. Aradia called him a nerd, and Sollux couldn’t argue. He walked down the hall, his heart skipping a few beats and his stomach twisting as he passed the bathroom (Aradia, thankfully, didn’t ask), before finally pushing open the door to his room.

The desktop computer sat in its place of honor atop his long desk, the two monitors still standing proud, though, like everything else, covered in dust. Chuckling quietly, Sollux informed Aradia that he had really needed three, but couldn’t bring himself to have an odd number, and four was just too much. She laughed at that, loudly, and again called him a nerd, though her tone was noticeably quieter.

The object of their mission stood on his nightstand. The tarnished silver frame was wiped clean of dust, then the glass front. His own face stared back at him.

It was a photo of him three years before after winning the Hack-a-Thon. His smile was thin and obviously forced, and careful not to show any of his misshapen teeth. His hair was shaggy and black atop his head, and he could just barely spot where his hand had run through minutes before that as they informed him his picture would be in the paper. His round, wire-framed glasses covered eyes of brown and blue, and did nothing to hide the deep, dark circles under them. His cheekbones stood out sharply, almost as sharp as his chin, and the hands that clasped the award were thin and bony and just shy of comically large. 

“That’s me,” he said quietly, again nervous for some (probably fucking stupid) reason he couldn’t discern.

She was quiet when she spoke, and the sincerity in her voice made the heart currently beating against the ribs melt. “Thank you for showing me this, Sollux,” she said, and though she was currently nothing more than a psychic presence, he thought he heard her voice catch. “Please take this with you, if you don’t mind. I think I’d like to look at it.”

Without a word, he tucked it into the deep pockets on the dress he wore with her body.

He stood still for a moment, like an awkward goodbye, though he had nobody to say goodbye to.

Thankfully, Aradia broke the stillness. “Best get going before someone reports a suspicious character,” she said, before cutting herself short. “Wait. Hm. Sollux, can you do something for me?” 

“Of course.”

“Reach up and run my fingers down my cheek, very gently.”

He did so, relishing the feeling of cheek ghosting against fingers and fingers ghosting against cheek.

“Did that feel nice?”

He reported that it did.

“Good. That was from me. Now take me home, before you fall asleep, because you’ve finally managed to make my body tired.”

Sollux felt like he could cry, but he didn’t. He just smiled, nodded, and walked out of apartment 2B.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to my man gia for prompting me with this appreciate you brother


End file.
